I thought for many years that the beseeching or begging mode of prayer was the best and only one.
This kind of prayer is represented in Lupa 2:14, with Jesse all alone in his empty ward, frightened for what might befall the Argonauts and his friend who leads them into battle:
"Jesse hoped and prayed and as days wore into weeks he only intensified his prayers. He began to pray as he had when he was a boy, kneeling down on the hard concrete floor, begging for intercession from the bottom of his heart."
I think this kind of prayer is appropriate for times of desperation. but there may a deeper and more rewarding kind of prayer that you may enter once the worst of your troubles have passed.
This kind of prayer involves silence, and attentiveness, and a willingness to listen to the quiet movements within you. To commune with your heart and consult your deep places, in order to find out where you may be going wrong, and how to get yourself back on to the proper path.
Because if there really is just one road to freedom - and the older I get the more I think that's true - then there is only one real task for prayer: to get us back to that true way, and allow us to walk it as faithfully as we can. So that prayer and purpose become the same thing, a search for navigational inspiration to put us in the right direction.
P. Julian
1 October 2018
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Here is the quote with some context:
Psalm for the Night Season
ALTHOUGH brave men might despair they are never truly abandoned, and they may quickly retrieve themselves by observing the proper form of prayer: make me to understand wisdom secretly -
For Wisdom waits patiently to answer the supplicant. She responds without hesitation to any right man who prays. She seeks him out just as he calls upon her, she goes seeking amongst the children of men to see if there are any who might understand -
She is called by many names for she is devoid of a common name. She is called for her succour and her good counsel, these fragmentary glimpses of her. The devout seek her in the cool places of the earth but she is also of the desert places. To the frozen wanderer she is Mother of the Snows, to lost seafarers Star of the Sea -
There are some who have sought for her all of their lives, whom she now cherishes as her sons. For these she glows fiercely in her loving protection, for the man who has the heart to call upon her constantly -
She moves beside him as he wanders in his waking state, she coils around him as he seeks the solace of sleep. Her compassion for him is perpetual, she will never forget him or leave him orphaned. Even if he should stumble, even if he should fall -
She whispers truths to him so that he might understand, she tells him wise things so he might stagger onwards to the finish of his journey. She bestows all of these gifts so that he might turn and bring comfort to her People –
She loves particularly those rare boys who grow properly into men. She does not hide her sensual parts from these, she calls to him like a Lover and not like a son, with all of the desire that has hitherto been hidden from him -
Knowing that men’s hearts respond especially to this. Knowing that if she calls to him as a Lover then he might comfort her People like a Lover, and not simply like a valiant, fallen son -
P. Julian - From the Chronicles of Lupa - Volume 2
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